An advocate said “simply having euthanasia offered already kills a person, because it deflates and defeats a person’s sense of self-worth, self-esteem, and of value.”
Miriam Lancaster’s story sparked “outrage” after she shared that she was offered medical assistance in dying (MAID) after arriving at a Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, hospital with back pain.
In 2025, 84-year-old Lancaster was taken to Vancouver General Hospital via ambulance after waking up with intense back pain. She was taken out of the ambulance and placed into the emergency room.
“The first person that I remember coming to speak to me was a young lady doctor. And this is where the story begins,” Lancaster recalled in an interview with “EWTN News Nightly.” “The very first thing she said to me was, ‘I would like to offer you MAID.’”
MAID is the euthanasia and assisted suicide law in Canada that allows a physician or nurse practitioner to administer or provide a drug that causes death to the patient.
After the doctor offered MAID, “I said: ‘No, thank you,’” Lancaster said. “I was certainly taken aback, and there were so many other things on my mind.”
Lancaster said she was thinking: “Yesterday I was feeling fine. I got out of bed this morning, and suddenly I am not feeling fine. I am in horrendous pain. So I need to know what’s causing the pain. Let’s not talk about end of life please.’”
“My husband, three years previously, had also been offered MAID. He turned it down,” Lancaster said. As “practicing Catholics, there is no way that we are going to take measures to end our life. That is in the hands of the Lord. So he turned down MAID when he was in hospital, and a few years later, there I am in the same hospital, and I gave the same response.”
Later, Lancaster was moved to the UBC Hospital. “By this time they knew that I had a tiny crack in my sacrum. That’s a little bone at the base of the spine,” she said. “There’s no surgery possible, so I was in bed, with some exercises of course, for three weeks.”
“When I got home, I thought, ‘Oh, I’ve been given a second chance here. I am going to make the most of whatever time is left,’” she said.
Lancaster said she and her daughter decided to travel to Cuba in the fall and to Mexico and Guatemala in the spring. While on her trip, Lancaster even went horseback riding on a volcano.
Offering MAID ‘defeats a person’s sense of self-worth’
Amanda Achtman, who works to humanize the conversation around suffering and death through the Dying to Meet You Project, told “EWTN News Nightly” she hopes Lancaster’s story “emboldens other seniors to speak out too” who have had similar experiences.
“Your story has gone totally viral in media all around the world because people are rightly outraged at the suggestion that you could have been offered death when you have so much life to live,” Achtman said to Lancaster.
People who are opting for MAID “are being killed by having a lethal injection administered by a doctor or nurse directly,” Achtman said. “And now in Canada, 1 in 20 deaths is the result of this premature hastening of an end of life.”
MAID “is the suggestion that is being made more and more often to Canadian seniors,” she said.
Achtman also works with Canadian Physicians for Life on ethics education and she teaches a bioethics course for St. Bernard’s School of Theology and Ministry. She was recently invited by the bishop of the Diocese of Victoria, Canada, to Vancouver Island, which she said is “literally the euthanasia capital of the world.”
“And while there, I met Miriam, but also others who shared with me experiences about unsolicited offers of euthanasia within the health care system,” she said.
One woman shared her story with Achtman about “having had euthanasia brought up by her family doctor, by a cancer specialist, and even by the funeral home.”
“Now, bringing up euthanasia is not prohibited in Canada, according to the Canadian Association of MAID Providers and Assessors — the government-funded group that is promoting this,” Achtman said. “There’s no prohibition, and they stress that.”
“However, what I would stress is that simply having euthanasia offered already kills a person, because it deflates and defeats a person’s sense of self-worth, self-esteem, and of value,” she said.
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